Spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.

Controls:

left/right: walk around

up: ruminate

down: smoke

About the game:

This is a shot at a collection of ideas I had a few years ago, about looking critically at the universe of Super Mario Bros. in light of the total lack of explicit narrative in the original game in particular. Who are these strange men? What motivates them? By what right do they wreak the havoc they do on this strange place? What do they feel about where they are and what they're doing?

And so, this is one lens through which to look at all that, with Luigi, the second brother, the also-ran, as a complicit onlooker, wandering now through some fractured, rotting liminal place in this strange world, reflecting on it all in scattered fragments.

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Oh thank god I finally got through all the text. (No offense, its's brilliant writing but it takes a while to get through)

This is genius, the music is very fitting and feels thoughtful in the best way. The animations and the way Luigi walks are great.

Reminds me of how I sometimes wondered about those games and what was going on.

Also, more recently, "Game Theory" on Youtube. Don't know if you've seen it. He compiled evidence for Mario being a animal-torturing psychopath and Princess Peach getting kidnapped by Bowser on purpose. I swear these games just get better as you get older. xD

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My favorite thing is when Luigi has to turn around, and the new screen is the same as the old screen. An obstacle he's on the other side of, now, but to no purpose. An empty journey accomplishing nothing.

How can anyone see so many worlds and stay the same? What sort of person never learns, never changes, never loves?

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Woo, Ennuigi showed up on Rock Paper Shotgun! Trying to talk up PICO 8 a little in the comments; I'm thrilled to see my little thing show up there, but I really hope they'll cover PICO 8 itself some time soon, because it seems like such a natural fit for their general sensibility as a PC gaming site.

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This is perfect use of Pico-8, with its smallness. Very funny too. Very well executed of your idea for looking critically at the Mario World. Luigi chain smoking is funny and it's well animated and I love the way he ruminates and the music is great. I think you must be a perfectionist to have created this, because the gestalt of this is perfect.

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I'm just surprised at the part where the princess was asked why she stayed with Mario and the reply was that she had to be rescued. I figured that would be followed by Luigi thinking "But who will rescue us?"

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As the author and a massive fan of PICO-8 beyond just my work with it, I would be delighted to see someone do the work to get PICO-8 a decent wikipedia page. I was pleased but surprised to see Ennuigi get one; on the couple of occasions that it has made the rounds on the internet I've mostly tried to use it as a chance to laud p8 as a platform and a learning tool. zep's work absolutely merits a proper writeup.

Did you come up with all the dialog yourself?

Yep, wrote most of it over the course of a day back in August 2015. There's a few literary allusions in there and a big debt to existentialism, noir fiction, and Werner Herzog, but none of the text is recycled from anywhere, just me filtering through a lot of pent-up thoughts about the series.

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As the author and a massive fan of PICO-8 beyond just my work with it, I would be delighted to see someone do the work to get PICO-8 a decent wikipedia page.

I'd volunteer, as I've done a ton of Wikia work (I have several of my own and wrote every single game article on the Pico-8 wiki except for one, several of which were from scratch), but I'm rather wary of what Wikipedia demands as far as references go and have read online posts about people spending hours writing a Wikipedia article, put in references that seemed to mirror many other, accepted articles, then got an e-mail within a few hours stating their article had been deleted and they would never write one for Wikipedia ever again. Plus I'm not a tech person, so I'm not comfortable tackling something like that that I don't know if something is right or not.

I was pleased but surprised to see Ennuigi get one;

Same here, along with others talking about it around the net :)

There's a few literary allusions in there and a big debt to existentialism, noir fiction, and Werner Herzog, but none of the text is recycled from anywhere,

Yeah, I figured some stuff was influenced from somewhere. Lotta thoughts though, no matter where they came from!

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Anyone who wants to navigate the Wikipedia approval process is welcome to crib from anything on the Pico-8 wiki, to the extent that that's allowed in Wikipedia. A Wikipedia article would need more than this but you can start here: http://pico-8.wikia.com/wiki/Pico8 Wikia content is licensed CC-BY-SA.